


Iconogods

by ObiWanJesus



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, BAMF Bucky Barnes, BAMF Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Developing Relationship, Heavy Angst, How Do I Tag, Indentured Servitude, Intrigue, M/M, Obadiah Stane being Obadiah Stane, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Temporary Character Death, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-21
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-05-26 08:14:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14996618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObiWanJesus/pseuds/ObiWanJesus
Summary: In a society of haves and have-nots, the elite having taken overt control over the country where they sit untouched and unblemished by the perils faced by everyone else.Tony Stark is a have, his pot of gold bigger than most others.Tony Stark is also dead.Bucky pulled the trigger, but he wasn't the one holding the gun.





	1. Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Dear fuck, I haven't written fanfiction in... a decade. An actual decade. Holy shit. Okay, so, first off, this is winteriron, without a doubt. Could develop into Stuckony, eventually, maybe, but it's definitely winteriron. Second off, this world is grim. The divide between the rich and the poor is painfully obvious, and Bucky is, essentially, a really pretty object who just so happens to be really dangerous. And in this 'verse, Tony is, potentially, one of the people who could hold the leash if he wanted to. The divide is that deep.
> 
> That said, I only like my angst with happy endings, so I promise that there's a happy(ish) ending in store for both Tony and Bucky, and that they'll both have spines along the journey there. It's going to be complicated, messy, full of pain and possible betrayals, but they'll get there, and they'll get there on equal footing. Eventually.

1st of June, 2068

The United Conglomerate of North America (UCNA) was shocked and saddened as news surfaced over confirmation about conglomerate member Tony Stark’s death. 

Tony Stark, having gone missing a week shy of his forty-fifth birthday, had reportedly been out drinking with several friends aboard his yacht when he had stumbled overboard. After a long search down the shoreline, the previously presumed-missing Tony Stark’s body had been found. The autopsy report had confirmed dangerous levels of intoxication, and with lack of evidence pointing to foul play, it seems that Mister Stark had suffered a terrible tragedy due to inebriation.

Obadiah Stane, close friend of late Howard Stark and board member of Stark Industries, stands to receive Tony Stark’s conglomerate seat on the announcement of Tony Stark’s death.

Stane had this to say on Tony Stark’s death; _“The world has lost a great mind paired with great compassion. I can only hope to continue his legacy with providing safe, reliable security to the world over.”_

When asked about allegations about class A citizens abusing the other classes, Obadiah Stane refused to comment, saying, _“It is not my place to guess about legal allegations, though my heart goes out to those affected.”_

This has been the running theme with all conglomerate members, and their untouchable place in society. As always, The Daily Bugle will keep readers updated.


	2. Lazarus

His smile was asbestos fibers in Bucky’s lungs, so soft it kept him bleeding long after he’d left.

In front of him were members of the conglomerate, milling with wine in their hands and with poison in their eyes, bearing smiles so white and so perfect they couldn’t be anything other than fake. Bucky watched them from his corner of the marble and granite room, the painted domed ceilings making things - laughter, threats that came with laughter, promises in blood - echo oddly. He was tense but he kept his arms loose at his sides, a metal finger twitching for a gun that was there, but not on him; they were hidden in waistcoats, in decorative portcullises, on guards walking the perimeter, selectively deaf to what was being said. But never on him. 

Tony Stark’s return to the fold was unexpected, and the ripples it caused after his two years absence was already causing shifts in the oligarchy.

Bucky watched several smiles grow wider through the bustle of expensive dresses and silken suits and, matching the grins to the faces, tried to figure out who would be ordered to die next.

“His return is already causing problems.” The Widow’s words were almost as quiet as her heels as she glided up to him, and her voice as expressionless as her face. Guessing that the only reason she’d be stating something so obvious was to gauge his reaction to it, Bucky was careful to keep his face blank, too.

At his side, metal plating settled with a hissing slide that left his hand still, and Bucky cocked his head, eyes flickering from walking servers, to feet hidden behind thick curtains, to the archways people were steadily trickling through like a constant stream of expensive koi through canals. “Yup,” the p popping lightly.

The Widow was keeping her eyes on the crowd too, but he was willing to bet the majority of her focus was on her periphery - on him. “His speech was shorter than expected.” The words made Bucky want to crane his neck to the grand staircase, to the bits of glinting marble and gold where Tony Stark had stood only an hour before, talking with his hands shoved into his pockets, a Mona Lisa smile on his face that contrasted with the bold blue glow from his chest and the heavy promises he made.

_“Hello, everyone. Glad you missed me. Let’s get down to brass tacks.” Bucky knew the man well enough to know that his hands were callused and scarred from handling all the metals the world could dish out, but here, in this crowd, brass meant nothing more than a heavy bit of something to bludgeon a wife with where the blame would fall on the pool boy._

“Concise,” Bucky corrected instead, because it’s what Stark had said to him when he’d managed to corner the conglomerate member after the speech, a little desperate, a lot cautious. _'Your speech was short,'_ he had said. _'Concise,'_ Stark had answered, and then smiled, turned, and left Bucky with a growing wariness in his stomach that was more cavernous than the damned grand ballroom they were standing in.

There was a hum before the Widow turned to face him fully, eyes narrowed but the rest of her face relaxed as she blatantly searched his face. “You didn’t know.” That Tony Stark was alive. That he was coming back. That he was coming back right before control of his company would officially pass into Obadiah Stane’s red-soaked hands, along with his position in the conglomerate.

“No,” he answered truthfully, and far more blankly than he actually felt. He wasn’t sore about it. It was what it was, but it was a thorn in the side that was rapidly growing into a festering wound; Bucky’s place was precarious, and he didn’t have the right antibiotics necessary to make sure things would heal up as they should. And the Widow was always clever with her venom.

He felt her watching him for a moment longer, a questions forming at the tightened corners of her mouth. Bucky eyed her, unmoved and waiting, but whatever it was she had wanted to ask she apparently decided could wait. Her attention flickered, caught unruly, sharp like the glittering daggers of her teeth as she smiled at one Obadiah Stane, standing fuming in the center of a crowd of people.

“Good luck,” she said, easing away from Bucky to approach Stane. The man took to her hand on his elbow far easier than Bucky would’ve thought.

But then, it was an open kept secret that Natasha was the Widow. Just as it was an open kept shame that Bucky was the Winter Soldier.

At his side where he still kept his arms loose, a finger started twitching again. Feeling an itch, a live-wire tingle building up at the base of his skull, Bucky decided it was time to retreat from the noise and press of the grand chamber; there was no more evil to hear, see, or speak.

This was old hat. This was an old dance with familiar players, and even Tony Stark stepping back into the light with shadows under his eyes, in his eyes, didn’t change any of that. It didn’t, but it did, on the small atomic scale that reminded him of old schematics, older theories that bubbled over as boiling coffee and a flow of words that couldn’t keep up with the frustration building as tension between shoulder blades. That Stark’s grins had been a wolf’s who knew he swam in an ocean of sharks, but was confident he’d get out alive anyway. Any blood that’d taint the water wouldn’t be his, and gore trapped in jaws would be long coming.

But this Stark--

\--This Stark Bucky just got a glance of, disappearing from one archway into the next. Something hooked into the yawning cavern of his gut, and while Bucky could’ve cut that tether if he wanted, he chose to follow it anyway. The people he walked through parted for him without fully realizing it. Their conversations never wavered, and their attention never drifted to him.

The claustrophobia of it dug in anyway. The relative quiet of the balcony lowered his hackles a bit, and the balmy breeze of the night that brought in the smell of fresh water and hyacinths was almost enough to cover up the cloying scents of expensive perfumes and musky colognes.

“Party not to your tastes?” Stark asked. Bucky couldn’t get a proper look of his face with the man leaning out on the balcony and into the night, but he caught a glimpse of it through the blue glow emanating from his chest. Once, Bucky would’ve bet on a smirk to pair off with that lilt in his voice. Instead he was frowning, looking like a man who was standing on the edge of more than just a dark balcony.

Bucky shifted his feet, unsure, and it was only after his weight settled did he realize he’d subconsciously put his left shoulder forward, defensive. It took a lot of effort to not frown at Stark in return. “Not really,” he finally answered, stepping up to his side.

“Not going to ask?”

“Would you answer? Truthfully?”

“...”

Bucky clenched his jaw, trying to convince himself that he was lucky Stark didn’t give him a bullshit reply.

But inside the political storm was brewing, deaths were getting planned over tittering chatter and expensive, genuine champagne, and briefly echoing over the sounds of a string quartet was the noise of someone taking their anger out on a server.

And hovering over it all was the the oppressive feel of August heat, and heated tempers risings.

Because Tony Stark should be dead. Bucky knows. He was the one assigned to kill him. The reality of it wasn’t a guilty one, wasn’t a creaky cog that messed with the rest of his functions, but it was a ball-bearing where the rest of his choices hinged. Bucky knew it, and he willfully, wantonly ignored it. He had to. Apathy, or death.

There was a voice that sounded like four-AM cough rust, like water in the mouth while drowning in open air, scratching nails and small, bitter smiles, there was a voice that sounded like Steve, _‘Are those really your only choices?’_ And Bucky willfully, wantonly ignored it.

He had to.

“You look ready to murder,” said Stark in the mild, obscure tone of a fog deep enough to hide a body, and Bucky very carefully didn’t dart his eyes to him. But he did watch him under a fringe of hair and a guise of the hyper awareness that had only his metal arm facing Stark, glinting in the moonlight like a shield, like a knife.

Stark was watching back, unblinking and the look in his eyes bland, his frown neutral and twitching with unsaid things. Finally, the twitching settled into a smirk, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepening. “Guess you haven’t changed.” And with a friendly, assertive, slap to Bucky’s shoulder, straightened up from his slouch over the balcony railing - and from the edge of the thing Bucky knew nothing about.

“Dunno about that.” Everyone changed after all, and with a quick look over, Bucky harzarded that Stark’s changed the most of all. But it didn’t matter what Bucky thought, because Stark was already backing off with a lackadaisical roll of his shoulders, his smirk already firming up like the quick-drying paper mache to a favored mask.

Stark, backing off the balcony area with his hands spread only half as wide as his grin, says, “‘O ye’ of little faith, why are you so afraid?’” Stark quoted, and then he was gone, disappeared like a specter, like a well-dressed ghost, back into the cavern of the gaudily painted beast. Bucky was left to swallow down whatever retort he had on the tip of his tongue, whatever plea for forgiveness rested right under it, and it all went down like broken teeth.

It didn’t matter that Stark didn’t know that Bucky was the one who killed, tried to kill, him; Bucky had a damn chip on his shoulder, and he used that missing bit of jagged bone, and carved it into a shiv.

The exchange was still rattling around in his head when he finally bedded down at the early hours of the morning, closer to sunrise than he’d liked. Rattled like the way Steve’s lungs used to, rattled the way Bucky’s teeth used to on the streets, shocked from cold, cold from death.

His room wasn’t really his room, but his life wasn’t his either. The metal sterility of it suited him, here, deep in the undercroft of Hydra Incorporated’s wood-and-gilt splendor of want and fancy. It reminded him, in what was left of the Brooklyn boy side of his brain, that he was never really part of Hydra. 

It didn’t matter that that was a cold comfort for his rank in society.

“Mr. Barnes?” His arm whirred, the tiny screwdriver clenched in his fist denting inward from the strength of his grip. He released it with a concentrated effort, and the serving girl, the hooks of the oligarchy deeper in her than in him, didn’t cringe under the weight of his stare.

“Yeah?” He prompted, fatigue putting a gruffness to his voice.

“For you, sir.” The girl set a note - made of real paper, who the fucked wasted money on real paper - down on his tiny bedside table, then saw herself out. Getting stiffly to his feet, shoving away from his corner desk with a fake view of the mountains, Bucky worked his way over, then worked the little note open far more carefully. 

_'Crow’s nest, tomorrow at 2300._

_You know who I am.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe a bit early for this, but here, take my tumblr: https://iconogod.tumblr.com/
> 
> I made it for this fic, but I'll be posting general winteriron stuff on there too. Comments and kudos give me encouragement.


End file.
